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New Orleans, Louisiana
New Orleans ( or , locally or ; ) is a major United States port and the largest city and metropolitan area in the state of Louisiana. The population of the city was 343,829 as of the 2010 U.S. Census."Largest U.S. Cities by Population, 1850-2010", U.S Census Bureau, in World Almanac and Book of Facts 2012, p. 613. The New Orleans metropolitan area (New Orleans–Metairie–Kenner Metropolitan Statistical Area) had a population of 1,167,764 in 2010 and was the 46th largest in the United States."Largest U.S. Metropolitan Areas by Population, 1990-2010", U.S. Census Bureau, in World Almanac and Book of Facts 2012, p. 612. The New Orleans–Metairie–Bogalusa Combined Statistical Area, a larger trading area, had a 2010 population of 1,214,932.U.S. Combined Statistical Areas 2010 The city is named after Orléans, a city located on the Loire River in Centre, France, and is well known for its distinct French Creole architecture, as well as its cross-cultural and multilingual heritage.Cultures well represented in New Orleans' history include African American, Creole, Cajun, French, German, Irish, Italian, Jewish, Latino, Spanish, and Vietnamese. New Orleans is also famous for its cuisine, music (particularly as the birthplace of jazz), and its annual celebrations and festivals, most notably Mardi Gras. The city is often referred to as the "most unique"The term "most unique" is grammatically incorrect, as the word "unique" is a superlative. See for example: Merriam-Webster Dictionary of American Usage, Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, Inc., 1994. Fowler, Henry, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, Oxford: Oxford University Press, USA, 2003. Nicholson, Margaret, A Dictionary of American English Usage, New York: Oxford University Press, 1957. in America.Institute of New Orleans History and Culture at Gwynedd-Mercy College[http://hurricaneonthebayou.com/html/behind.htm Behind the Scenes: Hurricane on the Bayou]David Billings, "New Orleans: A Choice Between Destruction and Reparations", The Fellowship of Reconciliation, November/December 2005Bring New Orleans BackSpike Lee offers his take on Hurricane Katrina, by Damian Dovarganes, Associated Press, July 14, 2006 New Orleans is located in southeastern Louisiana, straddling the Mississippi River. The city and Orleans Parish ( ) are coterminous. The city and parish are bounded by the parishes of St. Tammany to the north, St. Bernard to the east, Plaquemines to the south and Jefferson to the south and west. Lake Pontchartrain, part of which is included in the city limits, lies to the north and Lake Borgne lies to the east. History Beginnings through the 19th century La Nouvelle-Orléans (New Orleans) was founded May 7, 1718, by the French Mississippi Company, under the direction of Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, on land inhabited by the Chitimacha. It was named for Philippe d'Orléans, Duke of Orléans, who was Regent of France at the time. His title came from the French city of Orléans. The French colony was ceded to the Spanish Empire in the Treaty of Paris (1763). During the American Revolutionary War, New Orleans was an important port to smuggle aid to the rebels, transporting military equipment and supplies up the Mississippi River. Bernardo de Gálvez y Madrid, Count of Gálvez successfully launched the southern campaign against the British from the city in 1779.* New Orleans remained under Spanish control until 1801, when it reverted to French control. Nearly all of the surviving 18th century architecture of the Vieux Carré (French Quarter) dates from this Spanish period. (The most notable exception being the Old Ursuline Convent.) Napoleon sold the territory to the United States in the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Thereafter, the city grew rapidly with influxes of Americans, French, Creoles, Irish, Germans and Africans. Major commodity crops of sugar and cotton were cultivated with slave labor on large plantations outside the city. (1815)]] The Haitian Revolution ended in 1804 and established the second republic in the Western Hemisphere and the first led by blacks. It had occurred over several years in what was then the French colony of Saint-Domingue. Thousands of refugees from the revolution, both whites and free people of color (affranchis or gens de couleur libres), arrived in New Orleans, often bringing African slaves with them. While Governor Claiborne and other officials wanted to keep out more free black men, the French Creoles wanted to increase the French-speaking population. As more refugees were allowed in Louisiana, Haitian émigrés who had first gone to Cuba also arrived. Many of the white francophones had been deported by officials in Cuba in response to Bonapartist schemes in Spain.The Bourgeois Frontier : French towns, French traders, and American expansion by Jay Gitlin. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-10118-8 pg 54 Nearly 90 percent of the new immigrants settled in New Orleans. The 1809 migration brought 2,731 whites; 3,102 free persons of African descent; and 3,226 enslaved persons of African descent, doubling the city's French-speaking population. The city became 63 percent black in population, a greater proportion than Charleston, South Carolina's 53 percent."Haitian Immigration: 18th & 19th Centuries", In Motion: African American Migration Experience, New York Public Library, accessed 7 May 2008 During the last campaign of the War of 1812, the British sent a force of 11,000 soldiers in an attempt to capture New Orleans. Despite great challenges, the young Andrew Jackson successfully cobbled together a motley crew of local militia, free blacks, US Army regulars, Kentucky riflemen, and local privateers to decisively defeat the British troops, led by Sir Edward Pakenham, in the Battle of New Orleans on January 8, 1815. The armies were unaware that the Treaty of Ghent had already ended the war on December 24, 1814. at New Orleans, 1853.]] As a principal port, New Orleans played a major role during the antebellum era in the Atlantic slave trade. Its port also handled huge quantities of commodities for export from the interior and imported goods from other countries, which were warehoused and then transferred in New Orleans to smaller vessels and distributed the length and breadth of the vast Mississippi River watershed. The river in front of the city was filled with steamboats, flatboats, and sailing ships. Despite its dealings with the slave trade, New Orleans at the same time had the largest and most prosperous community of free persons of color in the nation, who were often educated and middle-class property owners. Dwarfing in population the other cities in the antebellum South, New Orleans had the largest slave market in the domestic slave trade, which expanded after the United States' ending of the international trade in 1808. Two-thirds of the more than one million slaves brought to the Deep South arrived via the forced migration of the domestic slave trade. The money generated by sales of slaves in the Upper South has been estimated at fifteen percent of the value of the staple crop economy. The slaves represented half a billion dollars in property, and an ancillary economy grew up around the trade in slaves—for transportation, housing and clothing, fees, etc., estimated at 13.5 percent of the price per person. All of this amounted to tens of billions of dollars (2005 dollars, adjusted for inflation) during the antebellum period, with New Orleans as a prime beneficiary.Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999, p.2 and 6 According to the historian Paul Lachance, "the addition of white immigrants to the white creole population enabled French-speakers to remain a majority of the white population until almost 1830. If a substantial proportion of free persons of color and slaves had not also spoken French, however, the Gallic community would have become a minority of the total population as early as 1820."Quoted in Jay Gitlin, The Bourgeois Frontier: French Towns, French Traders, and American Expansion, Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-10118-8 p. 159 Large numbers of German and Irish immigrants began arriving at this time. The population of the city doubled in the 1830s and by 1840, New Orleans had become the wealthiest and the third-most populous city in the nation.Lewis, Peirce F., New Orleans: The Making of an Urban Landscape, Santa Fe, 2003, p. 175 I n the 1850s, white Francophones remained an intact and vibrant community; they maintained instruction in French in two of the city's four school districts.Gitlin, The Bourgeois Frontier, p. 166 During the American Civil War, the Union captured New Orleans early; the city was spared the destruction suffered by many other cities of the American South. As the Creole elite feared, during the war, their world changed. In 1862, the Union general Ben Butler abolished French instruction in schools. After the war, during Reconstruction, in 1868, French language instruction was forbidden in schools. By the end of the 19th century, French usage in the city had faded significantly.Gitlin, The Bourgeois Frontier, p. 180 As late as 1945, one still encountered elderly Creole women who spoke no English.Gumbo Ya-Ya: Folk Tales of Louisiana by Robert Tallant & Lyle Saxon. Louisiana Library Commission: 1945, p. 178 in the early 1890s.]] During Reconstruction, New Orleans was within the Fifth Military District of the United States. Louisiana was readmitted to the Union in 1868, and its Constitution of 1868 granted universal manhood suffrage. Both blacks and whites were elected to local and state offices. In 1872, then-lieutenant governor P.B.S. Pinchback succeeded Henry Clay Warmouth as governor of Louisiana, becoming the first non-white governor of a U.S. state, and the last African American to lead a U.S. state until Douglas Wilder's election in Virginia, 117 years later. In New Orleans, Reconstruction was marked by the Mechanics Institute race riot (1866). The city operated successfully a racially integrated public school system. Damage to levees and cities along the Mississippi River adversely affected southern crops and trade for the port city for some time, as the government tried to restore infrastructure. The nationwide Panic of 1873 also slowed economic recovery. Reconstruction ended in Louisiana in 1877. Since 1874, the White League, an insurgent paramilitary group that supported the Democratic Party, had succeeded in disrupting and suppressing the black vote in several elections and running off Republican officeholders. With their help, the white Democrats, the so-called Redeemers, regained control of the state legislature. They imposed Jim Crow laws, imposing racial segregation and, with the new constitution and election laws at the end of the century, disfranchising freedmen. Unable to vote, African Americans could not serve on juries or in local office, and were closed out of politics for several generations in the state. Public schools were racially segregated and remained so until 1960. New Orleans' large community of well-educated, often French-speaking free persons of color (gens de couleur libres), who had not been enslaved prior to the Civil War, sought to fight back against Jim Crow. As part of their campaign, they recruited one of their own, Homer Plessy, to test whether Louisiana's newly enacted Separate Car Act was constitutional. Plessy boarded a commuter train departing New Orleans for Covington, Louisiana, sat in the car reserved for whites only, and was arrested. The case resulting from this incident, Plessy v. Ferguson, was heard by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896. The court, in finding that "separate but equal" accommodations were constitutional, effectively upheld Jim Crow measures. In practice, African American public schools and accommodations were generally underfunded. The ruling contributed to this period as the nadir of race relations reached during this period. 20th century at Burgundy Street, looking lakewards (1900)]] New Orleans reached its most consequential position as an economic and population center in relation to other American cities in the decades prior to 1860; as late as that year, it was the nation's fifth-largest city and by far the largest in the American South.Lewis, Peirce F., New Orleans: The Making of an Urban Landscape, Santa Fe, 2003, p. 175. Though New Orleans continued to grow in size, from the mid-19th century onward, first the emerging industrial and railroad hubs of the Midwest overtook the city in population, then the rapidly growing metropolises of the Pacific Coast in the decades before and after the turn of the 20th century, then other Sun Belt cities in the South and West in the post–World War II period surpassed New Orleans in population. Construction of railways and highways decreased river traffic, diverting goods to other transportation corridors and markets. From the late 1800s, most 10-year censuses depicted New Orleans sliding down the list of largest American cities. Reminded every ten years of its declining relative importance, New Orleans would periodically mount attempts to regain its economic vigor and pre-eminence, with varying degrees of success. In 1950, the Census Bureau reported New Orleans' population as 68% white and 31.9% black. By the mid-20th century, New Orleanians saw that their city was being surpassed as the leading urban area in the South. By 1950, Houston, Dallas and Atlanta exceeded New Orleans in size, and in 1960 Miami eclipsed New Orleans, even as the latter's population reached what would be its historic peak that year. Like most older American cities in the postwar period, highway construction and suburban development drew residents from the center city, though the New Orleans metropolitan area continued expanding in population – just never as rapidly as other major cities in the Sun Belt. While the port remained one of the largest in the nation, automation and containerization resulted in significant job losses. The city's relative fall in stature meant that its former role as banker to the South was inexorably supplanted by competing companies in larger peer cities. New Orleans' economy had always been more based on trade and financial services than on manufacturing, but the city's relatively small manufacturing sector also shrank in the post–World War II period. Despite some economic development successes under the administrations of DeLesseps "Chep" Morrison (1946–1961) and Vic Schiro (1961–1970), metropolitan New Orleans' growth rate consistently lagged behind more vigorous cities. as viewed from Uptown (1991)]] During the later years of Morrison's administration, and for the entirety of Schiro's, the city was at the center of the Civil Rights struggle. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference was founded in the city, lunch counter sit-ins were held in Canal Street stores, and a very prominent and violent series of confrontations occurred when the city attempted school desegregation, in 1960. That episode witnessed the first occasion of a black child attending an all-white elementary school in the South, when six-year-old Ruby Bridges integrated William Frantz Elementary School in the city's Ninth Ward. The Civil Rights Movement's success in gaining federal passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 provided enforcement of constitutional rights, including voting for blacks. Together, these resulted in the most far-reaching changes in in New Orleans' 20th century history.Germany, Kent B., New Orleans After the Promises: Poverty, Citizenship and the Search for the Great Society, Athens, 2007, pp. 3–5 Though legal and civil equality were re-established by the end of the 1960s, a large gap in income levels and educational attainment persisted between the city's White and African-American communities.Glassman, James K., "New Orleans: I have Seen the Future, and It's Houston", The Atlantic Monthly, July 1978 As the middle class and wealthier members of both races left the center city, its population's income level dropped and it became proportionately more African American. From 1980, the African-American majority has elected officials from its own community. They have struggled to narrow the gap by creating conditions conducive to the economic uplift of the African-American community.